In the Court of the Crimson King – An Overview

Hot Stamper Pressings of Progressive Rock Albums Available Now

If you have the Atlantic pressing, from any era, you have not yet begun to hear this record at its best. The better sounding domestic originals we’ve played are clearly mastered from copy tapes, which results in dubby sound.

In the Court of the Crimson King is such a well recorded album that even the sound quality derived from second-generation tapes is still better than most of what came out in 1969.

(By the way, 1969 was a phenomenal year for audiophile quality recordings – as of 2026 we’ve auditioned and reviewed more than one hundred and twenty titles, and there are undoubtedly a great many more that we’ve yet to play. To make it easier for audiophiles to separate the wheat from the chaff, we’ve also identified more than 25 Rock and Pop albums essential to any audiophile record collection worthy of the name.)

Now on to brass tacks.

UK Polydor Label

Passable, not really worth the labor to put them in a shootout just to have them earn sub-Hot Stamper grades. A1/B5 is a common stamper for these pressings and with those stampes the Polydor is not worth the vinyl it’s pressed on.

Pink Label Island

The same can be said for some of the earliest UK Pink Label Island pressings. None of them has ever won a shootout and probably none of them ever will. (A number of Pink Label Island pressings that never win shootouts can be found here.)

The conventional wisdom which holds that original pressings are superior to reissues in this case turns out to be flat wrong.

The Pink Label pressings can be good, but we rarely buy them, our two best reasons being:

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Billy Joel – The Stranger

More of the Music of Billy Joel

  • This vintage pressing of Joel’s 1977 breakthrough album (thanks, Phil!) is doing most right, with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them
  • Tonally correct, solid, open, clear, with plenty of hard-rockin’ energy and present vocals (particularly on side two), what’s not to like?
  • “The Stranger,” “Only the Good Die Young,” “Vienna,” “Just The Way You Are,” “Movin’ Out,” “She’s Always A Woman” – some of Joel’s strongest songwriting can be found right here
  • We are especially big fans of the songs “Vienna,” a top track that often flies under the radar in body of work
  • 4 1/2 stars: “None of his ballads have been as sweet or slick as ‘Just the Way You Are’; he never had created a rocker as bouncy or infectious as ‘Only the Good Die Young’; and the glossy production of ‘She’s Always a Woman’ disguises its latent misogynist streak… Joel rarely wrote a set of songs better than those on The Stranger, nor did he often deliver an album as consistently listenable.”

We recently completed a shootout for the album and this was one of the better copies we heard. After playing a stack of mediocre Strangers, we are completely confident in saying that you’ll have a very hard time finding a copy that sounds this good.

The Stranger is chock full of some of Joel’s biggest hits, including Just The Way You Are, Movin’ Out, Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, Only The Good Die Young and She’s Always A Woman. AMG raves about this one (4 1/2 stars) and it’s easy to see why — this is the kind of pop music that still sounds fresh 40 years (!) after it was recorded and might just be good for another forty years. (more…)

Gilbert and Sullivan – Overtures / Ward

More Recordings in Living Stereo

  • You’ll find INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides of this vintage Shaded Dog pressing of Gilbert and Sullivan’s music
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • Rich and sweet Living Stereo sound from the first note to the last – who can resist these sublime orchestral arrangements?
  • The Overtures are played to perfection – for music and sound, this one is hard to fault, a Top Title in every way and one that belongs in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection
  • This pressing is clearly a Demo Disc for orchestral size and space

The hall is HUGE: spacious and open as any you will hear, but not at the expense of richness or fullness. The orchestra is solid and full-bodied, yet the woodwinds and flutes soar above the other sections, so breathy and clear.

How did the Decca (recording) and RCA (mastering) engineers succeed so brilliantly where so many others have failed, failed right up to this very day?

Who knows? It’s still a mystery that has yet to be explained, to our satisfaction anyway.

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Arnold – Guitar Concertos / Bream

More Living Stereo Recordings

  • Amazing sound throughout this original Shaded Dog pressing, with both sides earning INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • These sides are wonderfully full-bodied, rich and present, using state-of-the-art All Tube Living Stereo recording technology that was so advanced in 1961 it thought it could transport a living, breathing Julian Bream directly from his studio into your listening room
  • It turns out that with today’s playback systems and cleaning technologies, the dream of being in the “living presence” of the performers has become a reality
  • Bream’s guitar sounds sweetly natural, not overly detailed and the orchestra is exceptionally well recorded, as we would expect from a good RCA of this period

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Rossini Overtures – Reissues Versus Originals

Hot Stamper Pressings on Decca & London Available Now

The London and Decca original pressings of Decca’s recordings are the best sounding, right?

Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.

We were a bit surprised that some of the (expensive) originals didn’t sound very good to us in recent shootouts.

Bad vinyl, bad mastering, who knows why so many early copies suffer from thick, dull and veiled sound? 

The Stereo Treasury pressing of Maag’s 1958 recording you see here is shockingly good in many ways. It sure doesn’t sound like a budget reissue.

If anything it sounds more original than the originals we played against it!

It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording Technology, with the benefit of mastering by means of the modern cutting equipment of the mid- to late- ’60s. (We are of course here referring to the good modern mastering of many years ago, not the bad modern mastering of today.)

The combination of old and new works wonders on this title, as you will surely hear for yourself on both of these Super Hot or better sides.

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Bruce Springsteen – Tunnel of Love

More of the Music of Bruce Springsteen

  • You’ll find solid Double Plus (A++) sound throughout this original copy – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • On the better pressings like this one, you get something approaching the warmth and unforced clarity of analog we audiophiles crave
  • Some of Bruce’s best material is here: the title track and “One Step Up” are two of our favorites
  • 5 stars: “Bruce Springsteen followed the most popular album of his career, Born in the U.S.A., with [a] low-key, anguished effort, Tunnel of Love.”

As is the case for the Bob Clearmountain mix of Born in the USA, the sound is not exactly vintage analog at its best, but at least on vinyl you get more analog qualities than would otherwise be possible. This is 1987, not 1967 and not even 1977. That said, the copies that earned the better grades were big and rich, with plenty of studio space and nicely present vocals.

Mostly what they do well is that they fill out the sound and take the edge off of it without losing musical information, dynamics or energy. Not many copies managed that feat but this one did. (more…)

Letter of the Week – “What a mind-blowing experience!”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Jimi Hendrix Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently (emphasis added):

Hey Tom,    

Well, you found another INCREDIBLE Hot Stamper with “Axis: Bold as Love.” What a mind-blowing experience!

This was at least my fifth copy of this album and it shamed all other sad sacks I had bought.

I really don’t know how you do it, but I’m infinitely grateful that you do. The notion of a “great sounding Hendrix album” almost sounds like an oxymoron, but again you struck sonic gold and unearthed one of those rare few that offer a deeply satisfying listening experience – to put it mildly!

My appreciation for Hendrix’s towering musical achievements has doubled, maybe even tripled, from hearing this Hot Stamper. That’s quite a feat for an artist I already considered to be one of the best ever! All this because of those magical Hot Stamper grooves. This goes to show what a difference amazing sound can have on the ability to appreciate an album or artist.

Oh, and I once owned a copy of the abysmal Classic pressing. Among its many other failings is the decision to re-release it in mono. Mono!? “Axis” is one of the creative examples of stereo mixing known to man! Reducing this album to mono is a travesty, but I guess that didn’t bother Classic Records.

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Jefferson Starship – Red Octopus

More of the Music of The Jefferson Aircraft

  • An outstanding copy of the band’s sophomore release with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • 4 1/2 stars: “… there can be little doubt that it was Balin’s irresistible ballad ‘Miracles,’ the biggest hit single in the Jefferson Whatever catalog, that propelled Red Octopus to the top of the charts, the only Jefferson album to chart that high and the best-selling album in their collective lives.”

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Tchaikovsky / Nutcracker Suite / Karajan

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Tchaikovsky Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This review is from way back in the olden days (2005) before we were doing regular shootouts for all the albums we sell, so take it for what it’s worth.

In 2005 we had been seriously into collecting the highest quality record pressings for more than thirty years, yet it was obvious that we still had a lot to learn. In 2004 we started selling vintage vinyl with Hot Stampers, and practically every shootout we did taught us something new and interesting about records.

Much of that information ended up here, on a blog dedicated to teaching audiophiles how they can find better sounding pressings using the methods we pioneered.

We wanted to share with other like-minded audiophiles what we’ve discovered about higher quality vinyl and, even more importantly, we wanted to stress that experimenting with records under rigorously controlled conditions is the best way to learn about their sound quality.

Our Old Review

This import pressing has some astonishing qualities, qualities we are not used to hearing on vintage Golden Age recordings such as this (or or any other recordings, truth be told).

This 1964 release — our pressing is the whiteback reissue, which we tend to prefer — has 3-D-like clarity and spaciousness that we could hardly believe.

The stage is DEEP and you can hear all the way to the back of it.

The width of the stage is dramatically wider than practically any record I can remember playing in the last year or two. I felt as though my listening room got bigger when playing this record.

And the dynamics are explosive. This pressing can really get LOUD when it wants to.

In some respects it’s hard to beat. But not, alas, hard to fault.

It lacks weight down low, whomp as we like to call it.

The details: (more…)

Teach Yourself Audio Using the Right Records

Advice on How to Make More Progress in Audio

If you believe what you read on the various internet sites where audiophiles gather to dispense advice about everything they think they know regarding music, recordings and equipment, you are asking for trouble and you are surely going to get it.

You will encounter an endless supply of half-truths, untruths and just plain nonsense, more often than not defended tooth and nail by those with typing skills but not much enthusiasm for the tedium of tweaking and critical listening. 

What kind of equipment are these people using? How deep is their experience in audio?

Truth be told, I was pretty misguided myself during the first twenty (or thirty, gulp) years I spent in audio, reading the magazines (I still have my Stereophiles and Absolute Sounds from the 70s in boxes), traipsing from one stereo showroom to another, trying to figure out what constituted “good sound” so that I could attempt to get my system to produce something closer to the best of what I was hearing.

Most of the time the demonstrations I heard made me want to go in a completely different direction.

Which is often what I ending up doing. The solutions offered by the experts, to these ears, fell far short of the expectations I had for the sound of music in my home.

Unbeknownst to me — I was far too inexperienced in audio to have a real understanding of what it was that I wanted — I was a thrillseeker, and the sound I was hearing rarely gave me anything that could be called a thrill.

So how do you learn about all this stuff?

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